Celebration and Grief - My Two Year Anniversary of Sobriety

One of the interesting aspects about abusive relationships is that they are not always abusive. Even in the worst relationships, there are times when it feels like everything is going to work out and that things aren't as bad as they actually seem. If you are lucky, eventually you realize that the same patterns keep repeating over and over again and that ultimately, you deserve better. 

Two years ago today, I made one of the bravest decisions of my life when I decided that I too deserved better. I decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life feeling disempowered and abused, so I ended a 40 year relationship and took the first step on a new journey. It's hard to believe that it has been two years. It seems like a lifetime. At times it continues to be a painful and lonely journey. In other ways it seems like it was just yesterday and I can remember all the good times we used to have together back in the day. 

The relationship I ended two years ago today was my nearly lifelong relationship with wine. In essence, I decided that wine and I had irreconcilable differences and that we needed to break up. I had tested the waters of taking a break from wine dozens of times before. I had made a Lenten sacrifice of giving up wine more years than I had not. I had toggled back and forth between thinking my relationship with wine was toxic and abusive, only to then once again convince myself that I could safely go back in for more because it really wasn't that bad. Like all abusive relationships though, even the ones where we ourselves are both the victim and the villain, eventually there needs to be an ending point. 

My relationship with wine goes all the way back to my early years. I can remember going into the local party store with my Dad when I was a boy. The store was at 10 Mile and Middlebelt Road in what was then a small suburb of Detroit called Farmington Hills. At the party store a nice man named Chris would sell us bottles of Mateus or Lancer's Rose and Moet and Chandon White Star champagne for our holiday dinner. I was way too young to actually drink the wines at that point in my life, but I still have fond memories of the times I got to go shopping with my Dad, how shiny the bottles were and how festive the whole experience seemed. Every once in a while I still walk into a convenience store and pick up a smell that takes me back to those moments. The best way I can describe that smell memory is as strange blend of cigarette smoke, stale beer, musty wine corks and cheap cologne. Smell can be such a powerful experiential memory activator because of the close relationship between olfactory signals and the brain's limbic system, which regulates emotion and memory. 

In my later high school years when my friends were hanging around in front of the local party store trying to get someone to buy beer for them, I would be inside the store sifting through bottles of Champagne, Asti Spumante and Zeller Scharz Katz, a sweet german riesling based wine with a distinctive black cat on the label. By the time I was 18, I had a shelf in my bedroom that had a mix of empty wine bottles along with hockey and bowling trophies. The shelf was mounted directly over the head of my bed and sat adjacent to my cork wall where I could pin up my favorite swimsuit posters, calendars and other pictures. It seems impossible to think about it as I look back and as a parent now, I can't imagine how I might react if my daughter Emma ever tried to do the same thing in her teen years. My Mom and Dad were both very understanding people and they trusted me. For all intents and purposes I was a good son. I followed the house rules and steered clear of trouble in almost all situations. Part of that is just who I am and part of it is because I am generally a risk averse person. 

By the time I went to college at the University of Michigan, I was already fascinated with fine wine and the art of wine making. If I had grown up on the west coast I probably would have gone to UC Davis and studied oenology, but as a midwesterner for life, that bold a decision seemed like an impossible leap for my risk averse mind to make. While I was at U of M in the early 1980s the white zinfandel craze swept the campus drinking scene as more and more college coeds woke up to the idea that there was something more out there than just nickel beer and 25 cent long islands, kar krashes ot bahama mamas.

I on the other hand, was busy being the 20 year old guy who was trying to complete his vertical collection of Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet all the way back to the inaugural vintage of 1971. I can still remember how I would wrap my special bottles in dark cloth napkins and stash them in the back of my dorm room closet so that they would not get popped open by some belligerent room crasher at the end of a night of drunken debauchery. I was far from your typical Big Ten underclassman in SO many ways. 

My first wife and I moved to Chicago in 1990 when I was 24 years old, bringing with us a collection of over a hundred rare and collectible bottles carefully packed in styrofoam shipping boxes. When we bought our first townhome a couple of years later, I seriously thought about converting the second bathroom into a wine cellar because I actually thought it would be a better use of the space. I'm pretty sure the current owner is much happier with a downstairs bathroom than a 1500 bottle wine cellar, so it's probably best that my harebrained scheme never came to fruition  - play on words intended. 

Shortly after the big move, I took a part time job as a sales clerk at a high end wine and specialty food shop named the Chalet on the Gold Coast to compliment my regular full time job selling debt collection services. My first wife was in law school at the time and we needed the extra money, but in truth I took the job more so I could hobnob with the Chicago elite or other celebrities and sell them first growth Bordeaux and single vineyard California cabernet. I'll never forget the day I sold Keanu Reeves a bottle of 1982 Chateau Petrus while he was filming the movie Chain Reaction in the mid 1990s. 

After about six months of working part time at the Chalet, the president of the company wooed me away from my full time job with the offer of a salaried manager position that included benefits, which I did not have with the outside sales job that I hated anyways. This would turn out to be one of the most significant forks in the road of my entire life. I had already to some degree normalized my unusual fascination with wine by turning it into my hobby. Now that I was making it my career, the lines between casual drinking on a daily basis vs. drinking to stay up to date on the products I sold became extremely blurry. I was already a daily drinker by that point, but from my mid twenties until my early forties, it would not be atypical to go through a case or two of wine per week between my wife and I along with the neighbors and friends we spent our time with. 

Christiana and I came together almost exactly 16 years ago to the day today and we started our life adventure together with a bottle of Provenance Cabernet. Our first bottle of Provenance together actually came before we even started officially dating. If I remember correctly, we went to see Cirque de Soliel's Delirium one night as friends who worked together and began the night with dinner at Carlucci's in the West Loop because it was on the way to the United Center. That was the first of many bottles we would share over the next dozen years before she chose sobriety a year sooner than I did. In one of our most amazing wine experiences, we enjoyed a private multi-course dinner at the actual Mondavi Estate with one of the owner's personal liaisons. We actually sat outside sipping Fume Blanc in the vineyard with a view of the famous arch that is on the classic label Mondavi used in the early years. At that dinner we were also served the 1984 Mondavi Private Reserve Cabernet out of a 3 liter bottle, which was then autographed by the wine maker and sent home with us as a souvenir. 

When Christiana and I got married in August of 2013, we had our guests autograph and write messages on four different wine bottles: one each for our one, five, ten and twenty-five year anniversaries. If you are doing the math at home, you have probably figured out that the ten year bottle came ripe for drinking a few months ago on our ten year anniversary, but we left it in the basement in our storage locker and its fate is yet to be determined. 

There are SO many other chapters to the story of my life with fermented grape juice, but I think you have heard enough by now to understand that when I decided to end my sometimes toxic/sometimes healthy relationship with wine, that I was doing far more than just quitting drinking. I was saying goodbye to a best friend. I was getting a divorce from a partnership that spanned four decades of my life. I was snuffing out memories of special times with my Dad as a young boy. I was essentially eliminating the thing that had become my coping mechanism, my reward at the end of a hard day and my daily ritual. I was prepared for the challenges I would face learning to be a sober person after forty mostly decent years of enjoying wine. The part of the process that I had not fully considered was just how much grief I would experience. 

In retrospect it makes total sense. Wherever there is an ending there is a sense of loss and where there is loss there is the opportunity to experience grief, not only as a result of the current loss, but from all the collective grief that has accrued through an entire lifetime. Wine was my companion in the best times of my life and the worst times as well. Little did I know what kind of Pandora's Box I was opening when I began my journey with sobriety two years ago. The grief processing is far from over and the healing is still in progress on an everyday basis. I miss the former version of myself who used to get silly and have fun after a glass or two of wine. It's almost as if I am trying to re-learn how to have fun from the ground up and to date, I'm not totally exactly enthralled with the version of Jim who is more serious, less playful and at times even somber as a side effect of two years of sobriety. 

That being said, I would not go back and change a single thing. Ultimately I made the choice to quit drinking for the reason I stated at the very beginning of this week's reflection. I decided that not only did I deserve better, but my family and others who I love deserved better. The further I travel on my own path of psycho-spiritual awakening, the more certain I become that we have a responsibility to model the behaviors that we want our own children and other future leaders to embrace. My hope is that my daughter Emma and all the other magical children of her generation will learn to be comfortable being fully present in all of the moments of their lives without choosing to artificially numb the discomfort of a passing moment itself. 

So on this special anniversary day as I reach the two year mark of sobriety, I celebrate by raising a glass of nothing. There are definitely still times when my life feels a bit like an empty glass, but I am learning so much about myself by being more fully present in all of the experiences of life - both the joyful ones and the ones that bring up sadness and pain. 

I am well past the challenge of not having a glass of wine when I feel stressed or because I had a high activity day and I would like a reward. I do still miss the occasional celebration glass though. In many ways, celebrations feel a bit incomplete without a little wine and perhaps there will come a day someday in the future when I can have a few ounces without the fear of slipping back into an abusive pattern of behavior. What I do know for certain though is that day is not today, so I will continue my search for new ways to celebrate.

One of my current favorite ways to celebrate is to write a story about what's going on in my life, with the hopes that others might glean some wisdom from that story that they can apply to their own life. I've been doing that weekly for a little over ten years now and I see no reason what that pattern of behavior can't last as long as my former relationship with wine lasted. I can only imagine what I might create with another 30 or so good years of writing! 

Well that's all for this time. Thanks for celebrating with me. As always, I love to hear back from you so shoot me a reply email or text if you are so inclined. I'll probably check in with a few additional thoughts before the Thanksgiving holiday and keep your eyes open for my next guest blog post at the MenLiving site which will publish next Wednesday November 22nd. Until then, peace and blessings, 

Jim